Nikiforova L. V. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY VISUAL MEDIA: THE NEW ARGONAUTS BALLET AND THE CELEBRATION OF THE CHESME VICTORY IN 1770 // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2022. Issue 2 (32). P. 136-156

The New Argonauts ballet by Gasparo Angiolini was performed in St. Petersburg on September 24, 1770. It finalized a series of celebrations, including thanksgiving prayers, receptions and awards on the occasion of the Chesme victory, as well as celebrations of the anniversary of Catherine II’s coronation and the birthday of Grand Duke Pavel Petrovich. The ballet, which literally showed how Peter the Great and Minerva (referring to Catherine II) inspired Russian sailors in the battle against the Turkish fleet, concluded with allegorical scenes. It summed up the providential coincidence of the “tsar” days and the news of the grand victory that had just been received. The performance is important, above all, not because of its allegorical frame, but because of its documentary plot. We can see the ballet as a part of the history of visual media. Usually performances “on the occasion,” such as the one-time performance of The New Argonauts, interpret current events in the language of allegory. The New Argonauts is a rare attempt to present the documentary story of a major event into a visual form. Traditionally at this time news was learned by reading or by ear. The ballet, judging by the surviving program, showed the Battle of Chesme and the destruction of the Turkish fleet by means of theatrical machinery. The text of the program (in its documentary part) is based on the victory reports from Marquis Cavalcabo, envoy to Malta, and from the Commander-in-Chief Count Alexei Orlov that had been published in the Supplement to the Newspaper Sanktpeterburgskie Vedomosti on September 7 and 17, 1770. The performance became a kind of a newscast, “seasoned” with a lyrical plot about the brotherly affection of Yazon and Promak, in whom the audience easily recognized the commander-in-chief Alexei Orlov and his brother Fyodor Orlov; this plot is also drawn from the battle reports. This case shows the complexity of the formation of media as technically mediated communication and technically mediated ways of seeing. It expands the history and archaeology of media in the Russian context. There are few studies in this field and they cover “classical” objects like camera obscura, magic lantern, panoramas and dioramas, i.e. they try European trajectories on our soil. The New Argonauts, perhaps, demonstrates a culturally specific format of the overall process. The “centaur phenomenon,” which combines traditional theatrical techniques with a new intention of reportage, allows raising the question about other similar subjects in the history of visual experience and technology.

Keywords: visual media, early optical performances, New Argonauts ballet, Chesme victory

Mainicheva A. Y. THE ENIGMA OF THE CHURCH OF KIRENSK: TRADITIONALITY VS EXCLUSIVITY. THE IMAGE AND SYMBOL STRUCTURE IN THE ARCHITECTURE OF ORTHODOX CHURCHES // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2022. Issue 1 (31). P. 153-170

The essay reports how the solution to the problem of the traditionality and exclusivity of the image and symbol structure of the Orthodox church architecture is shown using the example of a church in the name of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker of the Holy Trinity Monastery of Irkutsk Eparchy, built in Kirensk in the 18th century. Jérôme Baschet’s methodological technique of searching for the traditional and the exceptional, which he applied to the analysis of medieval art, was used. For the first time, a relational approach is proposed in the study of architecture, implying the identification of the typological class of a building, the search for analogs or sources of the image of its structure. Attention is focused on issues of localization, prevalence, concretization of the embodiment of the building’s features. It has been established that the church can be characterized as a wooden tiered three-part gate monastery church, but there is no direct analogue of the church. The architecture of the Kirensk church has some features inherent in wooden three-part, three-part tiered, and gate monastery churches; it has an original volumetric planning solution. The semantics of the church is associated with its belonging to gate monastery temples, which are the border between the consecrated space of the monastery and the profane neighborhood. In its tiered forms, one sees an analogy to Heavenly Jerusalem, and the altar dedicated to St. Nicholas has a protective symbolism in a broad sense. The appearance of the church is similar to defensive structures, such as the towers of the Siberian fortresses and European castles. Several signs allow admitting the similarity of the forms of the church with Ukrainian baroque architecture, Petrine baroque, Gothic architecture of Russia and the Carpathian region. The traditional features of the church include the fulfillment of liturgical requirements – three parts; semantics, including the symbolism of the consecration of the altar, the protective function, the embodiment of the image of Heavenly Jerusalem, an appeal to the historical past; use of well-known materials, designs, and shapes. Traditionality in church architecture is associated with the sacred sphere and basic building techniques, and exclusivity with the visual component of architecture (proportions, metrology, interpretation of forms and structures). It is concluded that the criterion for the traditionality of church architecture is the prevalence of forms, symbols, images of temples in any territory in a certain era due to the preference for choosing combinations of structures and semantics. Exclusivity is provided by the variability of forms, which allows creating an original image system. The very possibility of variations, the use of new and individual techniques, the author’s reading of the building’s features, which fits into the framework of the regulations noted in the sacred books where the boundaries of the canon were not strictly delineated, can be attributed to the important features of the traditionality of Russian Orthodox architecture. The architecture of the Kirensk church combines the features of traditionality and exclusivity; it is a rare example of Orthodox church architecture, its figurative structure was not supported in the further development of Siberian architecture.

Keywords: image and symbol structure, semantics of architecture, Orthodox churches, traditionality, exclusivity, three-part churches, tiered churches, gate monastic churches, St. Nicholas Church, Kirensk, Siberia

Markov A. V. ICONOLOGY OF THE PICTORIAL ELEMENTS OF POEMS BY PRINCE VLADIMIR PALEY // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2022. Issue 2 (32). P. 68-87

The collection Poems (1916) by Prince Vladimir Paley does not have a common plot and composition, it presents scattered lyrical impressions. The composition of the collection is organized by extra-textual pictorial elements: headpieces and vignettes. Responding to the collector’s taste of the poet, these elements force one to read his lyrics differently: not as a transfer of personal impressions, but as a complex construction of his own identity based on various cultural languages. The use of the iconological method and appeal to the resources of visual semiotics allow showing how, thanks to the order of illustrations, certain motifs of romantic and modernist poetry cease to be self-sufficient, becoming only moments in the acquisition of a more holistic lyrical position. Such design elements of the book as cartouches with the titles of poems, headpieces with images of landscape and genre scenes, and scattered vignettes were analyzed; the entire volume of the book’s illustrative accompaniment was covered. The article shows that despite the fact that the design of this book is fundamentally restrained, which corresponded to the new settings of the taste of wartime, each type of artistic accompaniment builds its own program for reading these poems, not allowing the content of individual poems to be reduced to the reproduction of romantic, neo-romantic or symbolist motifs. The article demonstrates how cartouches with the titles of the poems allowed educated readers to thematize the relationship between nature and history by de-automating the perception of the title as an indication only of a subject topic. The decor of these elements indicates both the interpenetration of the natural world and the world of culture, and the inadequacy of individual languages or semiotic formations to convey the idea of a person’s metaphysical destiny. Three poems with the cartouches build an independent plot of the presence in nature of not only fatal forces, but also metaphysical insights. Illustrations-headpieces demanded a special interpretation based on knowledge of the realities and conceptual meanings of certain painting genres. The article proves that poems with the headpieces convey the general plot of the independence of an intimate mental life from ready-made patterns of history perception. In these poems, the idea dominates of intimizing history as the only way to comprehend the meaning of historical catastrophes. Finally, individual vignettes allow reading the entire array of the poems in this book as supporting the main idea of accepting natural necessity in order to overcome private ideas about fate, with the necessary Christian reinterpretation of forebodings and individual symbolic indications. Thus, the illustrative mode of the book corresponds to the principles of multilingualism and polystylistics of Russian modern style. The study allows clarifying both the landmarks of the official Russian culture of the pre-revolutionary period and the specificity of the poetic works of Vladimir Paley as one of the most striking cases of supporting the original poetics with the visual semiotics of natural and cultural objects.

Keywords: Prince Vladimir Paley, lyrical position, lyrical hero, polystylistics, iconology, book illustration, emblem